An Internet service provider (ISP) typically provides a core group of Internet utilities and service to its customers. Core services often include newsgroups along with Email, World Wide Web (WWW), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Telnet, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), etc. Newsgroups typically include a collection of topical message boards that ISP customers may post to and read messages from. The most widely available distribution of newsgroups is Usenet.
Usenet currently refers to a collection of approximately 90,000 newsgroups and is operated on thousands of newsgroup servers over the Internet or on networks employing the network news transfer protocol (NNTP). To distribute messages or articles within the network, a local newsgroup server for an ISP communicates with other newsgroup servers and compares newsgroup databases. A newsgroup server requests and receives from other servers any messages that the newsgroup server does not have. An ISP customer or newsgroup user may then access his or her local newsgroup server and retrieve messages from the local newsgroup server.
Articles or messages submitted to newsgroups are designed for discussion and are only accepted as text files. However, a binary file can be posted to newsgroups by converting the binary file to a text file. One way to post a binary file on a newsgroup is to use a program supporting UUEncode. UUEncode encodes binary data into a text message that may be posted on a newsgroup. Once posted, a user may retrieve the article or posting from the newsgroup to his or her computer and reconvert the file back to binary data using the UUDecode program. MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), a method used to add binary attachments to email, is another process for encoding binary data into a text message.
Newsgroups are organized into hierarchies based on subject distinctions. For example, several newsgroups are dedicated to binary postings. Binary postings tend to be very large as compared to text postings and do not transmit easily. In fact, some newsgroup servers prohibit posting of articles that are larger than a specific size. Therefore, a system called “Multipart Message” may be used to break up a large binary message into smaller message parts. In the system, many small messages are posted to a newsgroup, rather than one large message. A user may then retrieve all the message parts and reassemble them into a single binary file. A multipart message is identified by examining the end of a subject line of a message. All the parts of a multipart message will have a subject line that ends with [xx/yy]. For example, the first part of a 10 part message will end with [01/10] and the fifth part will end with [05/10], etc.
To retrieve or download messages, a user may use a separate newsreader program or a WWW browser with an inbuilt newsreader. The newsreader accesses the ISP's local newsgroup server, enabling a user to pull down as many newsgroups and articles as the user desires. However, to make newsgroups available to users, the ISP's newsgroup server has to dedicate hard drive space for storage. Accordingly, newsgroup articles are only available to users for a limited time before they are deleted to make room for new article postings.
Retention is the period of time that an article or message is accessible in a newsgroup. As articles in the newsgroup age beyond the retention period, the old articles are deleted from the server. A retention period may not be the same for all newsgroups. Some newsgroups, by their natures, involve large articles often incorporating binary files, such as images, music files, or video files. Because of the large amount of resources required by such groups, an ISP will typically set the retention of binary articles lower than the retention period for newsgroups that contain text articles. If a newsgroup's retention is set too low, however, users will not have adequate opportunity to view a newsgroup's content. Therefore, retention performance is a characteristic of the quality of newsgroup services being provided by an ISP.
Two other characteristics in evaluating newsgroup services are completion and delivery performance. Completion refers to how often all parts of a multipart binary message are available at the same time at one newsgroup. Since all parts of a multipart message are needed to completely reassemble a binary file, it is important for all the parts to be accessible in a newsgroup. Therefore, a completion rate may be specified as a percentage of all the multipart files that are present in a newsgroup at the same time. If a newsgroup has a poor completion rate, then a user cannot successfully retrieve and enjoy much of the content in the newsgroup.
Delivery performance, on the other hand, is the measurement of the speed at which a newsgroup article can be retrieved from a newsgroup server, independently of network characteristics. While traditional methods of monitoring Internet delivery performance, such as pings and traceroutes, may be adequate to evaluate some Internet services, these traditional methods do not sufficiently measure the level of retention, completion, and delivery performances being provided by a newsgroup service. For example, although a ping program may determine if a specific IP address of the newsgroup server is working, it cannot tell if a newsgroup server is capable of sending and receiving high speed transmissions. Correspondingly, a traceroute utility cannot reveal if a newsgroup server is fully capable of performing all the newsgroup services that the newsgroup server is expected to.
Therefore, for an ISP to assess the quality of newsgroup service that it provides to its customers, an ISP needs a legitimate way to test the characteristics of newsgroup service. Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.